Since the earliest days of television, people have desired better quality in the video images displayed by televisions. Signal processing techniques are used to enhance the perceived quality of the video images displayed by televisions. One such technique is high frequency compensation, which is used to make video images to appear sharper. For certain legacy video standards (such as NTSC, PAL, and SECAM), a high frequency boosting circuit is used to boost frequencies that are higher than a certain limit (“boost frequency limit”). The boost frequency limit is often chosen to be a frequency around that of the chrominance carrier, which is around 3 MHz for NTSC signals. Typical high frequency emphasis circuits for such video standards use a simple first order differentiator circuit to emphasize certain portions of a video signal. The emphasized portions of the video signal typically lie in the portion of the signal that contains frequencies that are higher than the boost frequency limit.